As Channel 4's Child Genius programme heats up, take our quiz to see if
you can match the children on the show - answers are at the bottom of the
article

Things are hotting up in Channel 4’s Child Genius as the remaining 10 children fight it out to make the final in the penultimate episode this Sunday.

They’ll have to make it through the spelling bee and general knowledge round to stand a chance of being crowned Child Genius 2014.

Of course, knowing how to spell words like dehydroepiandrosterone – let alone knowing what they actually mean – is not a simple test of IQ. The competition also tests the limits of the children’s knowledge, memory and understanding.

Lyn Kendall, British Mensa's Gifted Child Consultant, said that the child with the highest IQ will not necessarily win the competition.

She said: “You could have an IQ score that’s astronomical but if you don’t know how to study, you get anxious under pressure or are doing [Child Genius] simply because you want to be famous, it’s not going to happen. Individual temperament is a huge factor when it comes to whether gifted children succeed or not.”

“Gifted children”, she added, are often “self-motivated” and want “to know everything about everything.”

Nine-year-old Aliyah features on the show (Channel 4)

While having a high IQ alone won’t be enough to get the Child Genius crown, most of the children on the show are in the top 0.01 per cent of the population.

So, how do you match up? Can you beat Aliyah, Tudor or Eleanor?

Even if you weren’t a child genius, your IQ can change during your teenage years. A study by researchers at UCL published in 2011 found that the IQ scores of the teenage participants varied by more than 20 points in 4 years.

Verbal and non-verbal IQ was found to rise and fall, with neuroimaging showing correlation between these differences and changes in the brain structure of the participants.

Ms Kendall said: “If someone was tested on one particular test, every ten years, throughout their life, then their IQ score would be seen to rise until around 18 when it peaks, and then tail off.”

The IQ test offered by Mensa is given to anyone from the age of 10 and a half onwards. The test does not change depending on how old you are, but the IQ of participants is measured against people of their own age.

Our quiz is a sample of the types of verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning questions you might get in an IQ test. The children in Channel 4's Child Genius had to answer a selection of these kinds of questions in their application to be on the show.

A child who is 10 and half years old would have to get 78 questions out of 150 right on the Cattell B test – which predominantly tests verbal reasoning – and 30 out of 50 on the Culture Fair test – a test of spatial skills – to be in the top 2 per cent of the population.

For a rough guide, this might equate to a score of around 60 per cent in our quiz - although it is not a full IQ test.